In the effort to keep day and night together.It seems just possible that a poem might happenTo a very young man: but a poem is not poetryâ€”That is a life.

War is not life: it is a situation,One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,Enveloped or scattered.

The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,Neither one for the other. But the abstract conceptionOf private experience at its greatest intensityBecoming universal, which we call â€˜poetryâ€™,May be affirmed in verse.

T.S. Eliot, â€œA Note on War Poetryâ€ (1942)

A canon of what has come to be known as World War One poetry has emerged inthe wake of Paul Fussellâ€™s influential study, The Great War and ModernMemory (1975). The title First World War Poetry is really a cipherprimarily for trench protest poetry. Fussellâ€™s focus on a small group ofprotest poets has come under great scrutiny by a variety of critics. As aresult, the canon of war poetry has widened to include poetry written bywomen, patriotic poetry written in favour of the war and poetry written onthe home front as well. What hasnâ€™t been challenged is how the verydesignation of war poetry is primarily English, it recounts experienceslimited to either the home or the Western Fronts, and for the most part,excludes experimental, modernist, and avant-garde writing. For example,Franceâ€™s relationship to the war is not as definitively unified in theopinion that the war was a tragedy that needed protesting and the poetsthat fought in the war, certainly more influential, international andlasting than their English counterparts, included Appolinaire and Cendrars. These highly experimental poets experienced the war, but their poetrybelied the experience in ways that arenâ€™t as immediately evident whencompared to their English counterparts. Writing that doesnâ€™t deal withexperiences of the war has not considered as politically engaged enough,traditionally, to merit the title of â€œWorld War One Poetryâ€.

This panel seeks to further dismantle the commonly held understanding ofWorld War One Poetry as English and in opposition to avant-garde writing.With its emphasis on the imagination instead of experience, experimentalmodernist writing, produced in a variety of different languages, respondedto the war in remarkably diverse set of ways that have remained poeticallyinfluential and engaging.

Papers are requested to form a panel for the European Avant-Garde andModernist Studies Conference in Belgium in May 2008 (see below). Papersshould focus on ways of challenging the male, English, protest nature ofWWI poetry through a consideration of the relationship between avant-gardepoetry and the First World War. Figures of interest include: Pessoa,Lorca, Mayakovsky, Appolinaire, Cendrars, Rilke, Stein, Pound, Eliot,Yeats, Ungaretti, Cavafy. Experimental prose writers such as Kafka andRoussel will also be considered. Colonial avant-garde responses to the warwould also be of much interest, including Canadian, Australian, Indian,South African, and in particular Scottish, Irish and Welsh writing.

We are looking for three papers for a panel, but the larger project wouldbe to form a collection of essays for challenging the predominantly Britishdomination of war poetry through a consideration of the EuropeanAvant-Gardeâ€™s multifarious responses to the war. Please send a 300 wordabstract to Anurag Jain, a.c.jain_at_qmul.ac.uk. Deadline is September 29th2007.

EUROPA ! EUROPA ?First biannual conference of theEuropean Network for Avant-Gardeand Modernism Studies29-31 May 2008Ghent University, Belgiumwww.eam-europe.ugent.beWith initiatives in the cross-disciplinary fields of avant-garde andmodernism studies booming throughout European academia, time has come toprovide a more permanent platform in Europe for scholars to meet anddiscuss their research. The European Network for Avant-Garde and ModernismStudies (EAM) will devote itself to the study of the avant-garde andmodernism in Europe within a global setting, throughout the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. EAM will promote interdisciplinary and intermedialresearch on experimental aesthetics and poetics, and aims to encourage aninterest in the cultural dimensions and contexts of the avant-garde andmodernism. The network aspires to embrace the wide variety withinavant-garde and modernism studies, and welcomes all scholars engaged inthese areas of research to participate in its first bi-annual conference.

Conference proposals and papers can be composed in English, French orGerman. Other languages will only be considered for panel presentations.